against the neurotic restlessness of these difficult times. The husband of a wife who has achieved such tranquillity returns from his work to his home as to an oasis, redoubles his loving efforts to make her ever more secure.
Because she can trust no man, the frigid woman's approach to the tasks of life has a difficult, painful, frenetic quality. She feels responsible for everything; guiltily responsible. Details and trivia overwhelm her. She has no unity and has to fight herself, her resentment, her self-rejection to get the simplest things done—her household work, planning the dinner, carrying and fetching the children. Everything looms.
With the development of the new quality of tranquillity those details of life that once seemed so difficult become simple. And because they are feminine tasks, household work, planning or getting dinners, keeping the children busy or in line—whatever life demands—soon lose their irksome and irritating quality and become easy, even joyful.
As tranquillity moves over to serenity, becomes more and more a part of her psychic character, a woman begins to realize what a miraculous and wonderful thing womanhood is. Most frequently this realization is ushered in by a sudden awareness of the miracle that her body is able to perform: the miracle of childbirth.
In her frightened heart the frigid woman has always detested and feared her capacity to become pregnant. To her this faculty has seemed onerous and burdensome, a curse. In pregnancy she feels trapped, sick at heart and in body during it, increasingly frightened of delivery as the day of confinement approaches. She views all this as woman's burden; men, those enviable creatures, are free of such a frightening duty. Indeed, has she not heard that men use pregnancy as a technique of keeping women subject to them! Thus she frets and rages and trembles, rejecting her destiny.
